I'm not really a beer drinker, says one of my dining companions. Let me see if I can change your mind, replies Dion, our charming server at Wet City (223 W. Chase St, [443] 873-6699, wetcitybrewing.com). Which he did, after quizzing my friend briefly on what flavors she found appealing (she affirmed...

Mild-mannered, soft-spoken, and conservatively dressed in a plaid button-down shirt and cardigan, Jumbled doesn't quite fit Baltimore's classic archetype of a DIY hip-hop producer. By day he's known as John Bachman, a high school teacher; but by night he transforms into Jumbled, one of Baltimore's...

Phaan Howng's "Biological Controls: If It Bleeds We Can Kill It" may be the closest you can get to a waking hallucination in Baltimore right now. The installation occupies the one-room project gallery on School 33's second floor, though the verb "occupy" barely conveys how utterly the installation...

Recent Features

Two weeks ago in our annual Holiday Gift Guide, City Paper told you what to buy for your loved ones, work buddies, and acquaintances—in between processing the pending Trump presidency—and this week, City Paper offers up a list of the events you should drag your loved ones, work buddies, and acquaintances...

I stand at the top of the stairs and cannot remember why I have climbed them. Am I heading to the left, into my son's bedroom? Right, into my study? Straight-ahead, into the bathroom? I try to retrieve the errand that has sent me up all three flights of stairs on this Thanksgiving morning with...

Many months ago, after too many shots of vodka with friends, I made a foolish bet on the presidential election. I placed my bet on Hillary Clinton. I was joined by my Russian friend Yury, who also thought Hillary would win. (Our respective partners believed Trump would prevail.) If our candidates...

You have told me that the media is biased against you and people like you—retired Navy submariners with Top Secret security clearances that they have never betrayed, construction managers who work as Christian missionaries on the side, mid-level insurance executives who, three years after an expensive...

Mobtown Beat

A day with five homicides, including a mass shooting and double-murder kicked off the week, which ended with three unidentified bodies found in a house in Harlem Park, all shot to death. Baltimore added nine more dead bodies to the year's murder tally, edging inexorably toward its second year of...

Crossing the train tracks under the highway near the Schuster Concrete building, Jim Petway looks hale and hearty on this sunny Friday morning. He looks pretty good for a guy who is being evicted from a tent. "They came down here last week and gave me 'til the 17th to vacate," he says on Nov. 5....

↑ City Council Out with the old, in with the new. The 15-member City Council will have eight new representatives come January, the biggest turnover since 2003, according to The Sun. And it is a youth movement, too, with victors Shannon Sneed (13th District), Zeke Cohen (1st District), Ryan Dorsey...

↑ Stephanie Rawlings-Blake Last week, the mayor announced that Baltimore is, and will continue to be, a safe space for immigrants and refugees, despite The Donald and his vitriol on the topic. As we all know by now, Trump fanned the flames of xenophobia during his campaign, saying that Mexico was...

Nine people were killed in Baltimore last week, including the namesake son of a whistleblower who was fired last year from the Housing Authority. Two days had two murders each. One day had three murders. Police charged a woman with attempted murder for allegedly shooting a 30-year-old man after...

Five more murders this week, including a triple shooting in broad daylight. Police also made arrests in two previous murders. Tuesday, November 3 1:10 p.m. Antonio Madeam, a 33-year-old African-American man, was on the 1800 block of Ruxton Avenue, two blocks from his home on the 1600 block, when...

City Folk

Dwight Whitley is better than this. His connections used to mean something. Back when George Winfield ran public works, Whitley would meet him at home after work and hang out. "His wife was a sweetheart," Whitley says. "He'd come in and say 'why'd you let this nigger in here?'" He laughs, remembering...

Eats & Drinks

We cracked the Peppadew code. Come at us, coppers. Back in March we went on a quest to discover what makes the Peppadew tick, where it comes from, why it's patented, and how we could bootleg them ("Thugs," Armed Guards and the Black Market for Delicious Patented Pickled Peppers). We had to do it...More

Bright, sunny, and inviting, Dovecote Café (2501 Madison Ave., [443] 961-8677, dovecotecafe.com), located in Reservoir Hill, might not look revolutionary, but it is. Since Aisha Pew, Aisha's mother Gilda Pew, and Aisha's partner Cole opened Dovecote a little over a year ago, the eatery has served...

In 2011, Sardinian-born Daniela Useli opened a small storefront carryout on 36th Street in Hampden. Soon, the neighborhood was swooning over her baked goods like sfogliatelle, the flaky pastries sometimes known as "lobster tails," and cream-filled bomboloni doughnuts. Patrons folded themselves...

Music

This year marks the 20th anniversary of the death of Tupac Shakur, who was shot on Sept. 7, 1996 and died on Sept. 13, 1996. It also marks the anniversary of his album, "All Eyez On Me," released on Feb. 13, 1996. Shakur, who lived for a time in Baltimore at 3955 Greenmount Ave., is forever associated...

Like all good country music, Kacey Musgraves' "A Very Kacey Christmas" splits the difference between searing sincerity and craven pandering, and understands that you can't have one without the other. Go ahead and start with 'Christmas Makes Me Cry,' one of four originals here, and the best and...

A big chunk of Neil Young's discography showed up on Apple Music and Spotify just a few days before Donald Trump's victory and I've been revisiting his noisy, rickety records of rage, rancor, and resignation ever since. There's maybe no musician who better articulates the long game of dissappointment,...

I will preface this live review of The Insane Clown Posse at Baltimore Soundstage on Sept. 24, 2016, by confessing that, yes, I have dabbled in Juggalism. One Halloween a few years ago, I donned a Philadelphia Eagles jersey and a camo jacket, stuffed a pillow under my tank top, painted my face...

-Ami Dang, 'Sublimate' On this rugged pop track from her latest, "Uni Sun," Ami Dang, an Indian classical sublimator (she dubbed her approach "Bollywave" in a Tedx Talk back in 2013) crafts curly-cued, post-Timbaland, meta-orientalism—a more mindful and just plain valid version of the "Eastern"-tinged...

Screens

Everyone loves Christmas movies. Well, maybe not everyone, but certainly enough people to justify dedicating an entire channel to them and endlessly looping a few over and over around the holidays. This year though, maybe you'll want to watch something different, something illuminating a different...More

The Baltimore Uprising did not begin in April 2015 following the death of Freddie Gray but, rather, back in November 2014, following the non-indictment of Darren Wilson, the officer who shot and killed Michael Brown. Then, Baltimore, like so many other cities, took to the streets in protest and...

The world of "Arrival," wherein a tense and frightened planet Earth sits helpless in the face of the unknown, isn't too far removed from the one we're living in this week or the world we'll be living in for the next four miserable years. "Sicario" director Denis Villeneuve's latest is a markedly...

Before "Moonlight" even begins, Boris Gardiner's "Every Nigger Is A Star" plays over production company logos, immediately telegraphing the uniquely black narrative about to unfold. Much has been made about Barry Jenkins' sophomore directorial effort and its relevance to filmic diversity—"Moonlight"...

One of the most appealing aspects of the American Visionary Art Museum has been the way it has democratized art. Here was a museum saying you didn't need art-school credentials to make legitimate art—you could be a prisoner, a mental patient, a homeless person, a retired manual laborer and if your...

I never liked my name: Zane Ronda Campbell. Ronda was a girl’s name. When I was in elementary school the Beach Boys had a hit called, ‘Help Me, Rhonda’. I lived in fear that the other students would find out my middle name and tease me endlessly. Elementary school was stressful enough without that....

This year's State of the Arts issue focuses on artists who are inclusive, daring, and ahead-of-the-curve—not comfortable sitting on the curve, or even man spreading on the curve, as so much oft-praised art in this city tends to be. In our cover story, “Balti Gurls on the Guerrilla Girls,” Balti...

How do you sum up the pervasive, seemingly inescapable system of gentrification by means of abstract visualization? Can any work elicit the violence of gentrification—the lasting impact that loss of community has on already marginalized communities? With her solo show "Occupational Hazards" at...

I met with artist Malcolm Peacock at Druid Hill Park—the site of his piece "Let the Sun Set on You," happening this Monday, Oct. 3, at 6 p.m. sharp—to discuss his work, and we could not stop talking about death. Earlier this year, in his final undergrad semester at VCU, Malcolm sent a brief, cryptic...

You are a square if you're in Baltimore and don't know Larry Luv.Thanks to his addictive Sunny Day parties and the whirlwind of high-energy designs flying out of his Huey Brand flagship store, the Douglass Housing Projects native has crafted a simple yet complex cocktail of innovative fashion and...

In a 2011 video interview with PBS's "Craft in America," Baltimore artist Joyce J. Scott talked about how she confronts race in her work. "I do have anger about [racism] and one of the great ways I deal with it is to make artwork that allows, in fact beckons people, to come to it," she said. "I...

Books

"Why do you want to win?" Victor "Slangston Hughes" Rodgers, 33, asks an eager group of five young poets at the Edward R. Murrow Park in Washington, D.C., back in July. He has been coaching youth poetry teams for the last five years, but this team, the sixth Baltimore Citywide Youth Poetry Team...

"Wet Moon: Feeble Wanderings" by Sophie Campbell (Oni Press) Set in Savannah, Georgia, at an art school, graphic novel "Wet Moon" is a sprawling millennial soap opera (that's a good thing, by the way) that began in 2004 and consists of six volumes and a few hundred pages so far (this recent reissue...

Stage

Prior to directing a production of Shakespeare's "Much Ado About Nothing," theater-generalist-turned-artistic-director Ian Gallanar wasn't sure that the Bard was for him. He thought the language would be dense, that the show would be dry. But then a line or two started to make him laugh. "It seemed...